If there’s one thing Yankees might have over those of us fortunate enough to live in Dixie, it would be their appreciation for the best tasting white-fleshed fish in our lakes: yellow perch.
“Perca flavescens” to scientists and Caesar, but I don’t thing Julius or Augustus or Nero ever had the pleasure of chasing them on Lake Burton.
This fishing report wasn’t intended to be about perch, but I can’t keep secrets very well and I have figured out how to catch a mess of “perca flavescens”…or whatever.
This perch knowledge fell into my lap because the bass club to which I belong fishes at Lake Burton each September. Over the past two weeks I have been making frequent visits to the Rabun County reservoir to see if my honey-holes still held honey (bass), but as it so often goes in my fishing experience, they were empty.
No problem; I’ll find them. As I slowly idled across likely areas my high-dollar sonar, fish finder, down scan, side scan, and bottle opener began to show me brush piles I had never seen before.
At only 2775-acres I thought I knew about most of the better brush piles on Burton, but unexpectedly I was now displaying them on my sonar screen in places I knew did not have any.
What’s been going on? Has there been a brush-pile-building maniac hard at work?
My fishing partner said, “It must be the debris blown into the lake by the tornado that leveled all those houses a few years ago.”
The tornado to which he referred happened over five years ago, in April of 2011. Surely I would have noticed the debris before now. I do fish the lake a couple of dozen times a year and had not noticed all these new brush piles before today.
So we stopped and fished some of the better looking new brush piles and quickly learned what that they were not brush piles at all. They were grass beds…coontail grass or something like it.
Growing three-feet tall and displaying like a brush pile on my sonar. Not everywhere, just “here and there” and in patches no larger than 20-feet by 10-feet. Isolated, random and in 25-32 feet of water: the perfect place for bass to hunker down.
If you fish Burton at all you know “snot” grass covers the shallows in the summer and makes fishing a worm or a jig a messy affair. You’ll spend more time pulling the slimy gook from your bait than you will spend fishing. Snot grass has been there for decades.
But now coontail grass is making an appearance. (I’ll probably get emails telling me that it’s not technically coontail grass or that it has been on Burton for a long time, but I’m just telling you what I discovered and what I think is happening.)
Like snot grass you cannot drag a bait through coontail; accumulate enough on your lure and its sheer weight will snap your line. On lakes where coontail is notorious running a Rattletrap or spinner bait along the top of the grass line is often a successful pattern…unless the fish are buried in it and not willing to chase a bait.
That means drop shot time. I love drop shot fishing. We got to work.
We used three-foot leaders to hold our Zoom Tiny Flukes at the top of the grass line and that’s when we discovered Perch Mecca. I still don’t know if the bass are in the coontail grass because the perch grab your bait before the bass have a chance.
We eventually caught bass in the coontail but we could have filled the boat to sinking weight if we wanted to keep all the perch (okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration) that raced ahead of the bass to snatch our lures.
Take some minnows and a young person and give it a try. Fun memories and good eating await.
